Awesome! thanks for the update!

Thanks, mbrdmn. Time to revisit some of my favorite DRO maps this weekend.

mbrdmn, nice to see you working again on the DRO. :)

Hi everyone, I've just pushed this patch live to all maps - many thanks for all the testing you've done and the detailed feedback you've given, it's made it possible to get a much more polished and solid patch out where I wouldn't have been able to otherwise!

I'm going to see how the patch is received over the next couple of weeks then talk about what I want to do next.

I've been waiting for a long time. You finally need to renew it. Thank you.

Nevermind with the wring civs spawning - must be a problem on my side using an edited DRO version. Just tried with your original and now the correct civs spawn. Don't know yet what causes that

That seems like a decent idea. I don't really mind the moralising, its just that if you are in the flow of gameplay and a civilian randomly runs into gunfire(They tend to do that) it would suck for the mission to end.

is there any possible way to get the unusal factions to work again aliens or zombies ect.

Brumes Wolf - Yeah, this is gonna be a tricky one. At the moment there isn't a toggle for it but I want to at least keep it in by default. I'm going to see how reaction to it goes and might either add a toggle to reduce the severity of the punishment if needed. While I'm really into the direction that BIS took with the LoW DLC and I want to reflect some of that in DRO I'm aware it might come across as overly moralising, which isn't what I'd like to do. It's still a game afterall :)

A possible replacement might be to remove the hard fail situation but add in some sort of mission end readout detailing the civilians killed.


antb15 - Whew! Thanks for letting me know.

Tobur - I'll check that out for you as soon as CUP downloads again, presumably this civilian faction worked fine for you before?

Georg - Cool, okay - that part at least is working as intended though I think the language in the tasks is misleading. I've just pushed an update with a bunch of improvements to the hold task, including how the friendlies act, the interaction with the rendezvous task and the language. I've also made it slightly more difficult to complete the task and made the enemies and their reinforcements react more specifically to it.

Disregard my previous comments re AAF vs CSAT. I've had a couple of missions now with regular CSAT soldiers. I was indeed extremely unlucky

All these changes seem nice, but I have a question, is the autofail upon killing civilians going to be toggleable? It would suck to have missions in progress fail because some civilians died because of explosives or misidentification

Sorry, I meant that I am 500m+ away from the town the reinforcement squads are supposed to take and the hold task shows up in the town.

Does anybody else have problems with the selection of the civ faction? regardless what I pick it spawns vanilla civs. Tried it with LOP eastern europeans

Just for clarification, when you say "I keep getting hold tasks 500m+ away from my position in nearby towns" do you mean that you're inside the town and the marker is 500m+ outside of it or you're not in the town and the marker is? In the briefing text on the map screen you should get an idea of the town the allies will intend to take - does that not line up with what you're getting as a hold result?

Really like the idea of adding a cancel option - the easiest way for me would be to make it so that you can extract at any time as well as hold.

Georg - The fact that they're completing too early is definitely a problem - the current completion conditions are either the friendlies outnumber the enemies significantly or there are 4 or fewer enemies in the area in total (so that you don't have to mop up stragglers hiding in buildings for too long). I think it would definitely be a good idea to halt it until the player group is there, yeah. I think I also need to retune the conditions so success isn't quite so easy. It's difficult to strike the balance with these clear area tasks types!

Seems like the Hold task is still behaving weirdly. I keep getting hold tasks 500m+ away from my position in nearby towns, and by the time I can even get close to them they complete and the mission ends. Again, I would super like to be able to fight over the towns that the other squads are attacking. Maybe it can be made so I have to reach the hold marker first before the timer starts counting? Might also be good to add a "Cancel task" option that then tells me to extract, in case my squad is too battered to make it.

I would also like to think its super bad luck, but using the regular mission... i go not spec ops. Again. could be just be luck.

Thanks for the heads up, I haven't had time to test this myself but I'll check it out as soon as I can. My gut feeling is that you've had some insanely bad luck but I've been proved wrong on gut feelings constantly by silly code errors :)

Definitely something going on here. Another 2 missions AAF vs CSAT with only spec ops spawning. I did a NATO vs CSAT and regular CSAT troops spawned primarily

Hi mbrdmn. I've had an odd thing happen, that may just be bad luck. I played 4 missions tonight, all AAF vs CSAT and in every mission, only specop/viper units spawned on the CSAT side. I rarely get them pop up when I play NATO usually, so it was odd to get so many games in a row with them. The only reason it's a problem is because they are quite deadly when playing was ASR AI on realism.

Okay, I've updated with some end of mission hold refinements. For the purpose of this test DRO will always attempt to give you a hold and rendezvous ending. I've added some extra bits to try and make the hold position a bit more interesting - the hold AO is decided based on how many tasks are near it (favouring AOs with more tasks) and the actual position of the hold task is based on the average position of the enemy groups present in that AO's radius. Hopefully it helps!

Tobur - Haha, well I've decided to keep the patreon account shut down - I don't know how much time I'll have to dedicate to this over the next few months and I don't want anyone to feel like I'm not doing enough to warrant their donations. So far though I'm keeping a much better work/life/arma balance this time around! Thanks man!

Georg - Ahh okay! That makes sense. At the moment the AO for hold and secure is decided at the start of the mission but it sounds like I need to make it a bit more dynamic (so it's more like, you might say, a dynamic recon op :O) and take into account either where the majority of the tasks, enemies or the player are located at the end of the mission. The wording on that communication needs to be changed as well so that it's not telling you necessarily to hold exactly where you are - I think that's a mistake from a previous iteration I had.

@mbrdmn my point with my last long comment was that the "Hold your position" task showed up very far away from my current position (in Zaros proper while my previous task was 500m west of it), and that one of the reinforcement squads never moved.

Had a similar thing happen just now, was tasked with stealing a vehicle near the big airbase. Stole it after repairing, and was told to "hold my position, reinforcements are coming". The task was located at the enemy concentration marker right next to where the vehicle started. I then saw one reinforcement squad peel out in an APC, and then the task completed and my mission ended.

I would have liked to fight over the airbase, would have been an insane combined arms adventure. But I just got shafted by the mission ending.

.rpt: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfzhnrwdqlkwaw6/2018-08-21%20DRO%20-%20Hold%20task%20and%20reinforcements%202.rpt?dl=0

You are on fire😁you still have that patreon account...? Thanks a million, still the best dynamic mission generator around. Glad you picked it up again

Scratch that, I think I've found a solution already. Bit of an oversight in some very old code! Just updated with what should hopefully be a fix for those helicopters.

Ah yeah, that's a reasonably common one - another longstanding DRO problem. I'll have another look at the code for that and try adding some diagnostics if I can. One thing that would be useful to know just so I can make sure I'm looking in the right area, are you 100% sure that the hovering helicopter had just dropped off para troops or is there a possibility that it was a different heli (I know sometimes you can get a few of them appearing)?

Hey, I had a mission lately with unexpected enemy para drops by helicopter. The helicopter did not RTB / de-spawn but hovered in mid-air. Using RHS. No rpt unfortunately

Sure yeah, I just meant to say how it should be working - something's definitely broken if he's not at the exact marker position. I couldn't find any obvious gaps in the code logic looking at it offhand today so I'll try to collect diagnostics when it happens again. At least there's always the cancel task button ;)

Hmm, I did visit the marker after completing the intel objective but he wasn't there. The marker didn't move when I collected intel until I completed the objective, and I couldn't see a circle to mark the approximate location, if that was meant to be there.

The original marker pointed near a camp, and there were a few others nearby that I checked. The final marker was in the next valley over though.

I've had similar reports for ages now but I haven't been able to pin that down yet - when I next update I'll add some diagnostics that might give me a better idea of what's going on. Once you've completed the intel sub-task it's supposed to fix the task marker to the exact position of the POW (or HVT if it's an HVT task) and follow the movements of the POW exactly, so if he's moving it should still follow his position as he goes.

mbrdmn - Thanks! I had another issue last night, but I don't know if it's a bug or not. I had to rescue a hostage, and I completed the Collect Intel sub-objective but the marker just pointed at an empty space. Don't know if he just ran off or something. Other than that this update is excellent, especially as I've started to use ACE and it supports the new version much better.

Praseodymi - Found and fixed that issue with the civs - I also made a quick change to ensure the civilian informant is assigned after all the hostile civilians have been first. Those are patched in now :)

That sounds like technically everything worked as intended, though whether the intentions are any good is another matter haha!
If you have a both a friendly operating unit that would normally be an end of mission rendezvous target as well as additional forces intending to take part of the AO at the mission's end you can now get both the rendezvous task and the hold one simultaneously. The thinking being that if the other forces are all committed it would be strange to have you rendezvous then extract.
Maybe the problem here hinges on the barricade task just being too low-stakes to be a compelling objective. Perhaps that needs to be removed? The question would be whether it would still have felt weird if you had completed the other fortification variant?

I just had a very strange mission. I was told to barricade an auxiliary road between Kavirida and Zaros. My squad inserted by helicopter, and a friendly squad (Echo I believe) began moving from Therisa (east of Zaros) into Zaros. I built the barricade, and then was given "Hold" and "Rendezvous" tasks, both were in Zaros proper.

I started pulling back towards Zaros, and another friendly squad (this time with armor) moved from Therisa to Zaros. Another motorized friendly squad was apparently supposed to follow, but never moved.

The enemy seemed to send an entire platoon of air assault infantry and an attack helicopter to assault the barricade. I avoided them, but ran into an enemy MG team on the western edge of Zaros. After they had been killed, the "Hold" task completed and the mission ended. Seemed like the "Rendezvous" task canceled.

.rpt: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hflblorykx02mqa/2018-08-19%20DRO%20-%20Hold%20task%20and%20reinforcements.rpt?dl=0

Hmm, yeah sounds like the hostile AI were wrongly triggering the civilian death counter. Thanks for letting me know, I'll investigate!

So, I just had an... interesting mission. I'll summarise what happened and you can decide if this is intended behaviour. This was in single player, so everyone involved was AI, except for me.

My squad was in vehicles with mounted weapons. As we drove through a market some of the civilians drew weapons, and were taken down by.

I got a barrage of messages about civilian casualties from the AI, and the last one stated that the mission was cancelled and I should exit the AO. All of my objectives failed, except for one to contact an informant, and one that had appeared after the missions start to eliminate an HVT.

I decided to head towards the HVT, but along the way came across a civilian who drew a weapon and was killed by one of the gunners. This forced a black screen and mission failure.

I don't know if this was a bug occurred, were even armed civilians were triggering the game over state, but maybe AI shouldn't count as far as punishments go? If that's something that's possible.

Ah nice, I saw one floating inside a wall once and I presumed it had something to do with that but obviously it's not always the case. At least they should always be usable now but I'll have to continue working on that script.

The amazing floating table. The "Potential Intel" was on the table. Fortunately, I was able to walk under the table and grab the intel. This is in same RPT file that i emailed to you.
https://i.imgur.com/x7w5DmR.png

I've just patched a few more logic issues and added some friendly squad failsafes!

Doh! Dumb mistake on my part - that's fixed now. I also noticed that neutral AOs were not being assigned correctly when no objective preferences were chosen and that is also fixed. There were some logic issues with the friendly units and how rendezvous/hold mission ends were assigned so I've restructured those to account for endings with both types of friendly units present. Rendezvous and hold mission ends may sometimes be given together in those instances.

I think it would make sense to keep this test version up for a few more days instead of rushing the patch out for this weekend. Hopefully we're very close to having this sorted now, thanks again for all your help with testing!

RPT file emailed.

I have the same "Generating Objective 3" error as Stoner when I select HVT and Hostage tasks. I didn't specify a number of tasks to give.

.rpt: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6r6ljx4mdqmw4ck/2018-08-18%20DRO%20-%20Hostage%20and%20HVT%20Obj%203%20freeze.rpt?dl=0

As I type this, I've been stuck in "Generating Objective 3" for ten minutes. I selected only eliminate HVT and Rescue Hostage in the setup menu so I could test the Extraction fixes and three tasks.
Restarted the game. Same results.

I restarted again. This time, I removed the preferences for the types of tasks, but still specifying three. The gamea launched as it should.

UPDATE: Dynamic final task included rendezvous with Alpha team. Met with them and Extract task and support was issued. Helo arrived. We all boarded. Another Extract task and support was issued. Alpha team and my team successfully extracted.

Just pushed what I'm hoping will be the final test patch! Included is the completion fix for the rendezvous task and some improvements to the helicopter extraction. I just noticed a very interesting situation where the helicopter touched down too heavily and became damaged enough for its texture to change to the damage state. I'm now wondering if what was happening was that the helis would fly along totally fine then get damaged on landing juuuust enough for the check to consider them unflyable. To remedy that I've made them both untargetable by enemies and also stopped them from taking damage altogether just before they touch down. It's a bit fake but it's probably better to make that reliable and predictable. If I want to do a "oh god, someone shot down the extract heli!" situation in the future it would then allow me to do that in a more controlled fashion.

Georg - Interesting! I've been thinking about it but unfortunately I'm not sure if there's anything I can reasonably do to fix it. I suspect what's happening is that the ACE interface checks the names of newly spawned units before my DRO random names are assigned. Naturally there wouldn't be much cause for ACE to check for name changes and update itself constantly so it probably doesn't. If I'm right I imagine that if you hit the reset AI option you would get a completely new but still incorrect name on your reset unit.

@mbrdmn the names are the correct ethnicity for the faction, but they don't match between squad bar and ACE nametags. For example, I usually play as Russians of some sort. So a member of my squad might be named Dmitri Sokolov according to squad bar, but his ACE nametag might say Vladimir Petrenko. It seems totally random.

Here's a folder with the evidence I could find. In the second picture, note that my RPG gunner's name is Abram Sharapov in the squad bar, but is Yuri Alekseev in ACE nametags.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dvvep1nq9z2vunz/AACyglvElNLsr3EhbXewwRp4a?dl=0

Thanks Tobur! Are you referring to enemy spawns? If so, you should never be facing APCs, just whatever Arma considers a "Car" which can be offroads, hunters, striders etc. Some mods might label things like BRDMs as cars in which case there's a chance to see those. Per AO location there is a 60% chance to get one or more enemy vehicles of that type and reinforcements are more heavily weighted towards vehicles that can transport troops (so that they actually make it into the AO in time to be a threat).
I've been teasing it, but in the next major DRO update after I release this one properly I want to expand the vehicle lists, but I'll give more info on that soon.

mbrdmn, glad you are back, the update is a blast! Love the new mission types. And the enemy para-drop caught us by surprise... One question: how (high) is the chance for armed cars / APCs to be spawned? Don't think I saw any, but haven't tried out so often wiith my group yet. Keep it up and I wish you good luck with any other projects you have

Oh lol, I forgot to actually have that task complete anywhere in the code - that'll be fixed in the next patch. Cheers!